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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

h/t to Best of the Web. TNiO is a regular feature there highlighting newspapers and magazines that take completely opposed positions on issues. I'm sure BOTW would have been all over this, but the feature is on hiatus until the new year.

Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Ms. Giffords, killing a federal judge and five other people, and wounding 13 others, appears to be mentally ill. His paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.

But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.

...

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

Two families in Brooklyn — and the larger family of New Yorkers and the New York Police Department — are mourning the deaths of two officers who were shot in ambush by a criminal on Saturday. His deranged act has inflamed rifts between the police and Mayor Bill de Blasio and between the police and the public, and it posed a grave test of Mr. de Blasio’s leadership.

The protests for police reform should not be stifled — they should be allowed to continue, and be listened to. The protesters and their defenders, including Mayor de Blasio, need offer no apologies for denouncing misguided and brutal police tactics and deploring the evident injustice of the deaths of unarmed black men like Eric Garner. As Mr. de Blasio noted on Monday, a vast majority of demonstrators are “people who are trying to work for a more just society,” a mission that has nothing to do with hating or killing cops. Those who urge violence are on the fringe, Mr. de Blasio said, rightly denouncing them and urging New Yorkers to report them.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

In trying to understand the War of the Sexes, I was wondering whether or not we can learn anything from the mating habits of other mammals. I haven't spent a lot of time researching it, but my current conclusion is: probably not. The following few paragraphs summarize what I found.

the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species' [i.e., humans and chimps] genomes differ by 1.23% -- a ringing confirmation of the 1970 estimates -- and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males. [emphasis added]

The emphasized words could be interpreted to mean that human females are mostly somewhat refined, hairless chimpanzees, while the human male is significantly more evolved from our closest cousins:

As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn't changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn't much difference between human females and other animals.

What has changed is the role of males. Among chimps, males hang out in groups, form alliances, forage together, and do a lot of bickering over status. They do not participate at all in child rearing. By the time hunting-and-gathering tribes arrive, however, men have been folded into the family. Monogamy predominates and both parents participate in child rearing. The extraordinary innovation is "fatherhood," a role that doesn't really exist elsewhere in nature.

Of course, not all human societies are monogamous. And with the War of the Sexes, we seem to be moving rapidly away from monogamy to some combination of polygamy and promiscuity. Promiscuous as far as having sex goes, though having sex with the intention of avoiding children may not count as "mating." As far as having children goes, my guess is that we're moving mostly towards a polygamous society with the alpha males servicing (but not marrying) the majority of females.

Relative to polygamy, monogamy benefits beta males, allowing them to mate. It also benefits alpha females, allowing them to monopolize an alpha male. In a species where the females are completely responsible for child-rearing (which is the vast majority of species), polygamy hugely benefits beta females. In a species that relies on males to help with raising children, and in particular in a species where males will only willingly help with raising their own children, polygamy is substantially less advantageous for beta females.

In the past, when western civilization was much less wealthy and had almost no safety net, it was a real struggle for a single woman to raise children on her own and survive (and have the children survive). It was far better for her to be stuck with a beta male helping raise the family - survival for her and her brood was much more likely. Indeed, they might even thrive in good times. Sure, the children might be genetically inferior relative to having an alpha male as a father, but it was still better than no surviving children at all.

The west is much richer now. With safety nets in place, survival is virtually guaranteed. As a result, it's far less imperative that a beta female attach herself to a beta male. There may still be advantages to being married to a beta male, but having healthy children and being able to raise them through adulthood is not one of them. Thus, it seems predictable that beta females would become much more demanding regarding which males they would be willing to mate with and they would be willing to leave that male much more quickly if even the possibility of a better opportunity presented itself. The downside is pretty small, especially with the reasonable, or even favorable divorce settlements that women often get.

My guess is that this female "hypergamy" is the basis for women and men "going their own way." Beta women are logically choosing to mate above their "station" (where "mating" means having children as opposed to just having sex) and beta men realize they have nothing to offer relative to alpha males and look for alternative ways to fill their lives. My guess is that the impact on civilization as a whole will be significant, but not devastating, but those are topics for future posts in this series.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

When I was growing up, there was a romantic narrative regarding relationships between men and women and marriage. Men and women were different, yet complementary with different strengths and weaknesses, incomplete without each other, so that a union of a man and woman was greater, perhaps much greater, than the sum of the two individuals - Venus and Mars, the moon and the sun, Yin and Yang, etc. A husband often referred to his wife as "my better half," sometimes with a little sarcasm, but with the grain of truth that the marriage helped make him complete, made him more than he was alone, made the two of them more than they were alone.

However, modern feminism (specifically of the Betty Friedan variety) has a rather different narrative. It starts with "the fundamental assertion of feminism is that women are equal to men, and equal not as counterparts to men but in every respect" noting for example that "[f]eminist women refused to suffer a husband’s proud, or ironic, praise as “my better half,” which implied that women (and of course also men) have a natural role making them counterparts of each other as couples." Feminism's primary enemy is the patriarchy and it was the patriarchy that was responsible for the old romantic notions that kept women (and to some extent men) in their place(s).

Under this theory of feminism, a marriage of a man and a woman does not inherently produce a whole that is greater than its parts. In fact, if both partners are completely equal in desires, capabilities, needs, etc., all that overlap may mean that generally the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

In the romantic narrative, men and women inherently had a lot to offer each other. But what does a man inherently have to offer a woman in a long term relationship in feminism's narrative (and perhaps any modern narrative)?

Not much.

Oh sure, a rich, attractive guy might be good for a fling, maybe even worthwhile to have a short term marriage with in order to have a child or two, followed by a divorce where she gets a great settlement. But till death do us part? Don't be silly, how naive and quaint. And that's just rich, attractive guys. The rest of us normal mortals? Fuhgeddaboudit!

The instapundit's wife, Helen Smith, has a website that focuses on the, in her opinion, poor treatment of men by women and what she thinks the effects of that poor treatment will be. Until recently, I've been chuckling because it seems pathetic that men need a woman like Smith to stand up for them and so I hadn't taken her seriously. She wrote Men On Strike about "Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters."

I haven't read her book, but in googling for statistics for this series of posts, I've run into some interesting data that certainly does not contradict her claims. For example,

Between 1950 and 2010, the rate of marital formation dropped by 39%, with a 17% drop between 2000 and 2010 alone.1 Today, the proportion of men between 25 and 34 years old who have never been married is more than six times higher than it was in 1970. For men between 35 and 44 years old, the increase has been more than fourfold. Marriages that do form are about twice as likely to end in divorce today as in 1950.

Here is a related chart showing the trend of marriage formation for young adults (ages 25 - 34):

Note that the above chart is for men and women, so the numbers don't exactly match the previous paragraph but it's easy to see that they are likely consistent.

So the data is consistent with young people deciding to not get married in much larger numbers than in the past. Some of them may be putting off marriage until they're older, but it looks like others will never get married. If the trend continues, within decades a majority of adults will never marry.

In The Sexodus, the acronym MGTOW is used and stands for Men Going Their Own Way. In a mostly monogamistic society, for each MGTOW there is a corresponding female version (WGTOW). It's still not completely clear to me whether the MGTOWs or the WGTOWs are the root cause of falling marriage formation rates. It may not be that men are going on strike, but rather that women have no interest in them so they're simply retreating to alternative lifestyles and activities that they may consider inferior but achievable.

After all, the Friedian Feminist has very little use for men, so they may have no choice but to go their own way.

Friday, December 26, 2014

In the last part of this series we examined the front in the war that is divorce and discovered that the evidence, such as it is, seems to indicate that woman are on the offensive and winning on that front. A second front in the war is rape. Who's winning there?

There is no doubt that for all practical purposes we can consider that all rapes and sexual assaults are initiated by males and can be considered a male offensive weapon in the War of the Sexes. Estimates of the numbers of female victims vary widely and are aggressively disputed. One camp claims there's a massive epidemic of rape, for example that one out of five undergraduate women at college are sexually assaulted:

Democratic strategist Van Jones said the number of women sexually assaulted on college campuses was "shocking."

"It’s literally one out of five," Jones said. [...]

The "one in five" statistic is frequently cited by advocates of sexual assault awareness. Both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have repeated it.

Because the truth is that there's no epidemic outbreak of college rape. In fact, rape on college campuses is — like rape everywhere else in America — plummeting in frequency. And that 1-in-5 college rape number you keep hearing in the press? It's thoroughly bogus, too. [...]

Sen, Gillibrand also says that "women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus."

The truth ... is exactly the opposite. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of rape and sexual assault is lower for college students (at 6.1 per 1,000) than for non-students (7.6 per 1,000). (Note: not 1 in 5). What's more, between 1997 and 2013, rape against women dropped by about 50%, in keeping with a more general drop in violent crime nationally.

So which is it? One in five (which is 200 per 1,000) and increasing or six to eight (times 4 years) per thousand and decreasing? Nobody seems to know and nobody can agree. There are many possible reasons for discrepancies:

Definitional - if the definition of sexual assault/rape includes things like a woman being made to feel uncomfortable by a man looking at her a certain way, it will yield much different results than if the definition only includes forced penetration under the threat of violence;

Sampling and survey issues - some of the studies that showed the highest numbers were small, local Internet based studies and may have had a bias towards respondents who were raped and also may not be applicable to the whole country;

Not all sexual assaults and rapes are reported - the studies with lower numbers may have underestimated the number of unreported rapes and assaults;

Some claims of rape and sexual assault are false - the studies with higher numbers may have underestimated the number of false claims of rape.

Etc.

The difference in the extreme estimates is important. With rape rates at the low end of the estimates, it seems that the criminal justice system should be able to handle it, keeping due process for the accused intact. With rape rates at the high end of the estimates (one out of five!!!), it is pretty much a national emergency, and things like "innocent until proven guilty" or even "guilty until proven innocent" may need to be thrown out the window and replaced with the much simpler "guilty if accused."

A lot of statistics are floating around the Internet: Two percent, say many feminists, the same as other crimes. Twenty-five percent, say other groups who quarrel with the feminists on many issues, or maybe 40 percent. Here’s the real answer: We don’t know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be corrected or ignored.

The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a “dark number” -- that is, there is a true number, but it is unknown, and perhaps unknowable.

Even accepting the "two percent" estimate, it should, in my opinion, still give us pause when considering throwing due process out the window and going with "guilty if accused:"

Benjamin Franklin thought "that it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." For "one hundred", substitute N, and probably everyone can find some N, between 0 and infinity, that they feel comfortable with. As one rather amusing essay points out, lots of people over time have put forth different values for N, with the current mean value being approximately 59.72. In other words, in the United States, we believe that on average, it is better for 59.72 guilty persons to go free than to have one innocent punished, but better to have one innocent punished than to have more than 59.72 guilty people go free.

Because even with the two percent estimate, more than one innocent person would be punished for every 59.72 guilty people going free and that seems to conflict with the American sense of justice. But this is a war, and justice is typically redefined or ignored in the context of war, and by redefining justice, women have turned the tables and have captured rape, or rather the punishment of men accused of rape, as an offensive strategy.

The OCR regulations are stunning in their presumptuousness. They are asserted with the force of law but were not passed by Congress or considered by the courts, nor were they formulated after a legally required process of hearings and comment. Equally stunning is the docility with which they have been received by the universities. Though there are signs of discomfort, not one has opposed an intrusion upon their self-government in a matter of educational discipline that previously has been left to them.

One could go on to explain features of the new OCR policy that make it a danger to civil rights, as indeed has been done in a published petition by a number of Harvard law professors. As to due process, these are rights that will not be protected by the new policy: a hearing, the right to confront or cross-examine witnesses, the right to an attorney, the right of appeal to a neutral party, protection against double jeopardy, the right to a presumption of innocence, the right to have one’s case heard by an impartial arbitrator. The new standard of misconduct requires less evidence than before, as it is necessary only to prove by “the preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The woman, or rather the complainant, has huge leverage with the man's (excuse me, the "respondent's") due process rights complete eliminated, replaced with an opaque bureaucratic process which metes out punishment with no or limited visibility into the decision making process.

The other front is State level legislation such as California's infamous "Yes Means Yes" law:

Last month, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation requiring colleges in the state to adopt sexual assault policies that shifted the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases from those accusing to the accused. Consent is now “an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.” The consent has to be “ongoing” throughout any sexual encounter.

On California campuses, consent is no longer a matter of not struggling or not saying no. If the student initiating the sexual encounter doesn’t receive an enthusiastic “yes,” either verbally or physically, then there is no consent. If the student is incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol, there is no consent.

The man has to prove the "ongoing" consent, which on its face means "guilty until proven innocent." However, short of videotaping the encounter, such proof is impossible, which means that this and other laws like it are indeed achieving the desired standard "guilty if accused."

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, one of the most prominent lawmakers fighting campus sexual assault on Capitol Hill, said Monday that affirmative consent laws should be made the standard nationwide.

At this point, "nationwide" just means on college campuses nationwide. But I can't help wondering if the ultimate goal is to make it nationwide, not just at colleges, but everywhere, all of the time, such that any woman can bust any man by accusing him of rape, even if completely false.

The problem is this: if a male and female are seen to consensually wander off together to a private location, she claims rape, he claims consensual activities, and there's no evidence of weapons or violence (not even a bruise), there are really only two choices: either prosecute all men in that situation under the "guilty if accused" approach, or prosecute none of the men because there isn't guilt beyond reasonable doubt - it's a "he said, she said" situation. I suspect that Sen. Gillibrand and many others would prefer the "guilty if accused" approach and they might one day have the power to make that the law.

In any case, men are badly losing the war on this front as well. As a result, it seems that many men might be in full blown retreat, a topic for the next post in this series.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures.

Monday, December 22, 2014

In the wake of the UVA gang rape hoax, (and the hoax just gets worse and worse and worse), my concern was not with the hoax or the false accusations or the poor reporting and fact checking, but with the acceptance and enthusiasm for this "fake but accurate" narrative. I decided to look a bit more into male-female relationships and am baffled, bewildered, and bemused by what I see.

The main problem with any analysis like this is that very few, if any, statements or facts apply to major group aggregations (like all men, for example), and once the group aggregations are broken down far enough (40-45 year old, male, divorced once, protestant, lower middle class, Midwestern, ...), there's not much data and considering the interactions between all of these smaller groups is very, very complex and, at least to me, not decipherable.

So this means that pretty much all analyses of the subject, including not only this post and the related series, but also every other article in old and new media, and I'm betting even most peer-reviewed papers on the subject, are mostly bogus. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most important topics with major impacts on many aspects of everybody's lives, so that there's little choice but to at least try to get an inkling of what's going on amid the inherent massive uncertainty.

Moving forward, with that background and those caveats, and realizing that each statement and statistic is at least partially bogus (I won't remind you of that again), let's start with divorce, which is the major front in the War of the Sexes.

Who's on the offense and who's on the defense at this particular front? Clearly women are on the offense since "[w]omen initiate between 66% and 90% of all divorces." One might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that the reason for women initiating divorce more often is that men are philandering, drunken, drug-addled louts forcing women to take drastic action, but there are at least a couple of things that don't fit that narrative.

Second, divorce has been significantly higher under "no fault" divorce law. It's when women can initiate divorce without real reason that there are more divorces. (There are more divorces initiated by men as well). If women need a "real" reason to divorce men, it's a lot harder to find.

And beyond worrying about men, like other wars, this war is causing a great deal of destruction to families, communities, and inner cities. It possibly is even weakening western civilization as it seems that men (and women) are increasingly avoiding marriage and starting families. So war is not really just a euphemism for the conflict between the sexes as there is substantial death and destruction associated with it.

Consider, as a case study, the data on divorce. Earlier this year, a pair of demographers released a study showing that regions with heavy populations of conservative Protestants had higher-than-average divorce rates, even when controlling for poverty and race.

Their finding was correct, but incomplete. As the sociologist Charles Stokes pointed out, practicing conservative Protestants have much lower divorce rates, and practicing believers generally divorce less frequently than the secular and unaffiliated.

But the lukewarmly religious are a different matter. What Stokes calls “nominal” conservative Protestants, who attend church less than twice a month, have higher divorce rates even than the nonreligious. And you can find similar patterns with other indicators — out-of-wedlock births, for instance, are rarer among religious-engaged evangelical Christians, but nominal evangelicals are a very different story.

I am mixing a lot of categories here: atheists versus non-religious, conservative Protestants versus Christians, etc., but ultimately, looking at the data, it looks to me that if you want to get married, start a family, and stay married, find someone who is reasonably devoted to a religion and practice that religion with him or her, at least to the point of regularly attending services. Even though I'm non-religious, if I were looking for a wife, I might take that approach - I might not believe the dogma, but attending services is a really small price to pay for avoiding divorce.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Having recently addressed an example from the past of how a distorted narrative was employed in the world of arts and literature to misrepresent people and circumstances, let us turn to the world of journalism.

The suicide of American journalism, and the “objective” ideal I grew up with as a young reporter, continues apace, as I noted in this space yesterday and the IBD website mentions today:

Media Malfeasance: In less than two
weeks, bombshell stories of a vicious gang rape and a millionaire teen
investor were exposed as frauds that never would have made it into print
but for gross negligence and liberal bias.
...
There’s a reason that, back in the day, every revolution began be
seizing the newspapers and radio stations. The Left understands, far
more than the Right, that propaganda is everything — and if it has to
kill American journalism to make its points, then so be it.

Over at Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield has some typically perceptive thoughts on “Life in Post-Truth America.” Well worth a read.

Worse than the hoaxes and reporting of half truths are the errors of omission. The neglect of both stories that make their side look bad (as if they should be taking sides) and stories that present the opposition in a positive light.

Excerpts from the column by the prolific Mr. Greenfield include:

The unreliable narrator has crossed over from a fictional device in novels to memoirs, journalism and into politics.
...
The device of the unreliable narrator puts truth out of reach. It says
that there is no such thing as truth, only various perspectives on an
event.
...
In the absence of facts, there can be no reality. There is only ideology.
...
ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in
imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the
war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The
stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also
completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a
post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in
which the America that was cannot exist.

America had prospered because of a firm belief in a discoverable and
exploitable reality. That was the country that could build skyscrapers
and fleets in a year. Post-Truth America has little interest in big
buildings because it’s too busy enacting a psychodrama in which the
earth is about to be destroyed. And fleets, like horses and bayonets and
facts, are 19th century toys that are much less interesting than the
manipulation of people through lies and deceit.

Lena Dunham’s Barry and Obama’s Barry are both imaginary creatures. They
are the sophisticated products of disordered minds and a disordered
civilization whose leading figures lie as instinctively and as
shamelessly as any pre-rational culture that could not distinguish
between lies and truth.

The cause for optimism is that two of the redoubts of the left, media and academia, will come under increasing competitive pressure for many years to come. (see also here and here)

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

I would've missed the first night (not being religious), but the younger daughter remembered and wanted to light candles (my daughters are borderline pyros, so any excuse to burn something is remembered with, well, "religious" fervor). We muffed the prayers (good thing there's 8 chances, maybe we'll get them right tonight?) but did manage to get the candle lit (and the candle to light the candle lit) and then, most importantly, had a family Happy Hanukkah Hug.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

As shown in the graph below, manufacturing (real) output (the red line) has finally recovered from the Obama recession and clearly has a lot of momentum in the growth direction. Of course, also clearly, that "momentum" isn't really momentum at all, and can change nearly instantaneously.

First some international comparisons. In the US, IP [Industrial Production] is up more that 73% in the past 25 years. In Japan it fell by 1.5%. Some of that is population, but not all. After all, Japan’s population is higher than it was 25 years ago, and America’s has risen by roughly 30%, not 73%. America industrializes as Japan de-industrializes. Germany reunified 25 years ago, which might affect the data, but their IP is up only about 30% since 1991. France is up only 9% in 25 years. (The 35-hour workweek?). Britain is similar to Japan, down by about 1%. (Falling North Sea oil output?) Italy is down 11.2% in 25 years. (Berlusconi spending too much time at orgies?) It’s the US that stands out as an industrial power, at least if the data is correct.

I wrote "somewhat related" because the numbers don't exactly match between countries (various countries slice and dice Industrial Production versus Manufacturing differently and the above commentary is more related to Industrial Production than Manufacturing, but the longer term trends are pretty similar). So you can get an idea from this, but I suggest not quoting any of the numbers without doing more extensive research to understand what you are quoting. Or at least put forth a caveat like I just did.

Nonetheless, of all the advanced economies of any size, the United States is actually doing quite well as far as Manufacturing output and Industrial Production goes (Industrial Production looks even better recently than the above chart because of the shale oil boomlet). Germany is the closest and may possibly be better, but even if so, not by much.

On the other hand, as the above graph also shows, while real Manufacturing output is up 73% over the time period (20 years), the number of jobs has dropped by 30% and as a percent of the workforce has fared even more poorly. A common explanation for the loss of jobs is that they've been transferred overseas, but given the fairly dramatic increase in output, all of the job loss and then some can be explained by increased productivity.

In other words, technology is more the enemy of jobs than foreign competition. But technology is what makes us all better off over the long haul.

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Humans are inherently flawed. Most of us are pretty decent overall and because of that, civilization has been able to take hold and flourish or at least survive.

Some people, however, are simply rotten to the core. It's a small percentage, but even a small percentage of a large population such as that found in the United States, is still quite a substantial number of people. These horrible people think nothing of lying, manipulation, fraud, assault, sadism, rape, even murder. I don't know what percentage of the population these people represent, but just to get an idea, some have argued that sociopaths alone make up 4% of the population. Even if that figure is off on the high side by an order of magnitude, we're still talking more than a million sociopaths in the United States alone.

These rotten apples can be found across race, gender, religious, and ideological boundaries. Oh sure, we could argue until we're blue in the face whether, say, more Republicans or Democrats are sociopathic (or otherwise horrible people), but the point is that any and every group has at least some of them.

Any crime or immoral act that you can imagine has probably been committed by some rotten apple(s) somewhere in each and every group. There are an uncountable number of sensational and horrifying stories just waiting for some intrepid journalist to track down and expose to the public. Such stories aren't really relevant or useful, other than being entertaining and/or engaging stories.

Magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university. What she didn’t know was which university.

She knew the narrative and the story within the narrative that she wanted to tell. She just didn't know the "where" or the "when."

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right.

And, of course, since she was going for the next big feature story, and a non-statistical anecdote has no real meaning anyway other than reminding everybody that rotten apples exist (which everybody knows already), the feel of the story and how it fits the narrative is extremely important. Fortunately, she finally found what she was looking for:

But one did [have the right feel]: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

...Phi Kappa Psi. The "upper tier" frat had a reputation of tremendous wealth, and its imposingly large house overlooked a vast manicured field, giving "Phi Psi" the undisputed best real estate along UVA's fraternity row known as Rugby Road.

Rich white southern males in an all male exclusive organization. A group that many love to hate. And certainly a group that everyone is allowed to hate. Nobody needs to feel guilty about despising, loathing, hating, etc. a group of rich white southern frat boys. The hate one is allowed to feel for this group would be beyond shocking if directed at virtually any other unrelated group.

The story starts with Jackie riding high. She's been invited to a "date function" at the frat and has meticulously dressed and primped. Next thing you know, Jackie is "climbing the frat-house stairs with Drew," her frat boy date. And like in a horror flick, where some character is going off alone and you're screaming at the screen, "DON'T GO THERE!!!" you know it's going to end bad.

And boy, does it ever end bad. I'm not going to get into the ugly details of the gang rape here (this is a family blog :-), but it caused a lot of outrage at the fraternity and UVA administration:

University faculty arranged a protest that kicked off late Saturday night on Beta Bridge, responding to a Rolling Stone magazine article released Wednesday that described an alleged gang rape of a UVa student by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity two years ago, and the subsequent missteps of the system by which the assault was reported. Charlottesville police have been asked by UVa to investigate the allegation. [...]

The Phi Kappa Psi house was vacated days ago, not long after the controversial article was released and the house was attacked by an anonymous group that is demanding changes in the university’s sexual assault reporting system. Some students have asserted that members of the fraternity left the house after receiving anonymous death threats, though the fraternity has not responded to these claims.

They attacked the entire house regarding something that happened two years ago. There were alleged "death threats" against members of the fraternity who may or may not have had anything to do with the incident. It's typical mob behavior, and in some fairness, they did have some justification to lump the entire fraternity in with the rapists: Jackie's story implied that the gang rape was some sort of fraternity initiation ceremony; therefore, that innocent women were regularly snagged by this fraternity for these heinous criminal acts.

Phi Kappa Psi voluntarily suspended its affiliation with the university not long after the release of the [Rolling Stone] article. And on Saturday, the university suspended all Greek organizations for the remainder of the semester. [...]

Thus, the entire fraternity and sorority system was punished for unproven allegations that nobody had ever been indicted for and that had happened more than two years ago. Due process was summarily thrown out the window. Many were quite happy about that:

Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless.

After all, the story fit the narrative so perfectly. However, it turns out that Ms. Erdely would have done well to have followed Jackie's request. Indeed, that request might have been the first hint that maybe this story wasn't quite factually accurate. But this red flag was ignored. Erdely also did not bother to spend a lot of effort fact checking the story or corroborating the very limited available hard evidence.

The fraternity, while cooperating with the police, found that pretty much everything that could be verified about the alleged gang rape turned out to be false and has since published a statement to that effect. Rolling Stone soon followed by adding a note to the beginning of the story that "there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account," but they have not fully retracted the story.

But of course they wouldn't retract the story. At the very worst, it's just yet another "fake but accurate" story. Fake in some details, but accurate to the narrative.

My first thought when finding that Jackie's story wasn't true, at least not completely true, was that Erdely was simply incompetent. Not because she produced a fake story but because she didn't bother to find a truer and real version of it. As I was noting in the beginning of this post, there are enough rotten apples that surely at some place and some time, a horrible gang rape has been committed by members of a fraternity. There are millions of people who have been members of fraternities and using the 4% rotten apples estimate, that's tens of thousands of bad people who have belonged to fraternities. All Erdely had to do was find the truer version and verify it and then she could've had a "true and accurate" story. An anecdote true in details and true to the narrative.

Several people I know think that the details are immaterial. So what that she apparently got the fraternity wrong? So what if she got the date wrong? So what if the people she described don't exist? Something likely happened to Jackie that night - that's the important thing.

In other words, "fake but accurate" is perfectly acceptable. Indeed a gripping "fake but accurate" story might be better than a true one if its details, even if wrong, are more compelling.

The collateral damage of smearing innocent people's reputations, vandalizing the fraternity, and shutting down the greek system are also not a problem - this is a group that it's okay to hate and okay to damage. The fact the Jackie's credibility is non-existent now that all verifiable facts turned out to be false is also unimportant. Women do get raped, so it doesn't really matter if Jackie's specific story is true at all. It's an accurate enough description of what has happened to somebody, at some place, at some time. Therefore, all males, everywhere, all the time, are guilty. And males, especially members of a southern fraternity, need to bear the brunt of the "fake" part of "fake but accurate" whenever and wherever required to further the narrative.

The Democrats, being intellectually dishonest, cling to the myth that
the two parties “switched places” on racial issues in the 1960s, that
Senator Landrieu’s troubles are a consequence of that reversal, and that
the general Southern realignment is evidence that the Republican party
is a comfortable home for bigots, Confederate revanchists, and others
with dodgy racial politics.

This is a strange line of argument, and an indefensible one once the
evidence is considered. Democrats remained the favored party in the
South for decades and decades after the passage of the landmark Civil
Rights Act of 1964, controlling a majority of governorships, Senate seats, state legislative bodies, etc., well into the 21st century.

...
Strange that redneck bigots would wait for so many decades to punish the
Democrats for giving up cross-burning; my own experience with that
particular demographic suggests that its members do not in general have
that sort of attention span.
...

In reality, the Republican party in the South was not the party of
peckerwood-trash segregationists; the GOP made its first Southern
inroads among relatively affluent, educated, suburban voters, i.e.,
basically the same people who were Republicans everywhere else in the
country, and the Southern voters least interested in segregation. And
that began in the 1920s, not the 1960s. But it really picked up during
the New Deal, with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support among Southern white
voters diminishing as his Prussian-style command-and-control economic
fantasies became more audacious.

When Democrats push their “trading places” legend, they insistently
(and dishonestly) ignore that their party, which was the party of
Southern voters before Lyndon Johnson finally got on the right side of
the lynching-law issue, was also the party of Southern voters long after
Democrats finally packed away their white hoods for good. Instead, they
will point to the presidential-election maps, which tell a different
story.
...

It was the 1994 midterm — 30 years after the fight over the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 — that announced the real realignment in Southern politics.
As with the New Deal, economic issues rather than racial ones were once
again front and center. Bill Clinton had had the poor sense to put his
wife in charge of a cockamamie project to quasi-nationalize American
health care — terrible idea, right? — and Republicans responded with the
Contract with America, an eight-point agenda that had zilch to do with
race. Only the very finest sensibilities of the dog-whistle detectors at
MSNBC could derive a racial agenda out of “require that all laws that
apply to the rest of the country also apply to Congress,” “cut committee
staff by one-third,” or “require committee meetings to be open to the
public.” (Go ahead — find the racial subtext;
I’ll wait.) It was that election that saw the Southern congressional
delegation go Republican for the first time. And while Clinton would
still win a few Southern states in 1996, Democratic presidential
candidates would subsequently find themselves largely shut out of the
South outside of Florida and Virginia.
...

That the Democratic party has attempted to hijack for itself credit
for the hard and often bloody work performed for a century almost
exclusively by Republicans, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, is a reminder
that the party of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton is not a place for men with a very developed sense of decency.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

In April, Jonathan Chait wrote the cover article in New York magazine, entitled "The Color of His Presidency". It asserted that, instead of alleviating race grievances, Obama's presidency has made them worse. Progressives have relentlessly thrown down the racist card, but mostly conservatives are racists, in that mostly means pretty much totally. It got a lot of attention from All Correct Thinking People.

Having not learned from my previous forays into the fever swamp that is fundamentalist progressivism, I waded in.

Small government conservative = racist hater.

That’s pretty much what virtually all the comments on this thread boil down to.

Paul Ryan says something that is, in effect, identical to things Pres. Obama and Bill Cosby have said. How is that racist?

Arguing confiscatory taxation is a bad idea isn’t racist. Believing that Great Society programs have created a culture of dependency isn’t racist; indeed, it can’t be. Viewing affirmative action programs as likely to harm their beneficiaries and inherently racist isn’t racist. Concluding that the ACA has made a dysfunctional system worse, and was sold only by grotesque lies isn’t racist. (And using Lee Atwater to tar these arguments makes no more sense than dismissing progressivism because Pres. Wilson was a thoroughgoing racist who thought eugenics a good idea, or FDR put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.)

The result is the Liberal Gulag. After all, it is so much easier to dump out another barrel of Racist Hater™ than countering an actual argument.

As to your objection that “Small government conservative = racist hater” is not a conceptual truth: this is true. Nevertheless, the sociology is disturbing. From Chait’s article:

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.”

That is, in case you haven't noticed it, not the brutal truth itself, but rather its executive summary.

Keep in mind, this Chait article got a lot of attention. It was, after all, a very long cover story for a major magazine. Further keep in mind the audience.

Do you know what none of those smug, arrogant, progressives did, including Chait?

How do I know they didn't read it? Because I did, far enough to discover what progressive political scientists call data (from page 11 in the "study"):

That is to data as a dog's breakfast is to haute cuisine.

Hence my response to Professor Holbo:

Did you look at the study at all, or are you satisfied with a quote from the abstract?

Go to page [11], and look at the three graphs depicting proportion slave in 1860 vice proportion Democrat, approving affirmative action, and racial resentment. You should notice that the portion approving of AA isn’t high anywhere. The center of the distribution in areas without slaves is only 20%, and the variation in racial resentment between low and high slave proportion counties is small — the slope of that line isn’t zero, but it isn’t much more than that. […] One standard deviation in slave proportion yielded a 0.11 point increase in racial resentment; 2.7 percent decrease in support for affirmative action, and a 3.1 percent decrease in among those who identify as Democrats.

The [upper left graph] shows a steep decline in registered Democrats in areas with high slave proportions in 1860. Fine, let’s take it as read that is due to racially derived resentment of Democrat policies.

You uncritically accepted the conclusions of a study because they confirmed your pre-existing bigotry. No matter that in two dimensions the change potentially due to racist feelings is small, and in the other it has no explanatory power whatsoever.

I have no doubt that the legacy of slavery still has knock-on effects in racial attitudes, but using this study as a tar brush to smear as racist disagreement with progressive policies makes the error of placing far more weight on the conclusions of this study than they can possibly bear.

You complain that I haven’t studied one thing that Chait cited. It’s true, I haven’t. But I have read a great deal, studied many other studies – historical and sociological and so forth. (Read that Lind article linked, upthread. That’s a good article.) So the question is not: is this study valid.

In other words, one of progressivism's pillars: fake, but true:

Chait completely uncritically accepted that study. All the readers of his article here, including you, did the same. What should get your attention is the degree to which that study failed to confirm your expectation. When a study clearly conducted to confirm a pre-existing conclusion almost completely fails to do so, perhaps it is the conclusion itself that needs revisiting.

His thesis is that hysteria, aggression and gerrymandering are white southerner’s last hope to maintaining political control.

Here is the evidence he presented for his thesis: gerrymandering. Well, of course! That has never happened anywhere ever before for any reason, therefore racists! (The maps he links to are no help. The pattern of the first can be closely approximated by average house size, percentage of black owned business, divorce rate, and, average humidity. The second relies upon a virtually meaningless US census distinction.)

As for his assertions, he presents no evidence whatsoever, unless an article written by a Northerner 93 years ago counts.

Why have I drug you through this fetid swamp of progfluffery?

Because it provides insight into the workings of the progressive mind. In order to maintain their own sanctified self image, they must first demonize, then ostracize, anything that might cause cognitive dissonance.

Before suggesting I am, once again, using a large gun and a small barrel to go fish hunting, this is no isolated example of progressives swallowing whole that which flatters.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a road show, where he panders to those Who Just Absolutely Love Science. In them, he trots out quotes to demonstrate the innumeracy and ignorance of selected targets: headline writers, congress critters, and Bush 43.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that the audiences lapped it all up.

There's a problem, though. (Actually two; I'll get to the second in a bit.)

Near as anyone can tell, none of Tyson's quotes exist in this time-space continuum. Now, as far as headlines or congresscritters go, the targets are so generic as to scarcely matter. (In the former, Tyson's inability to distinguish mean from median seems something of an own goal, and fair warning to those who should become more familiar with the concept of "the pot calling the kettle black".)

Not so with what Tyson attributed to Bush 43:

According to Tyson, in the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush uttered the phrase, “Our God is the God who named the stars.” According to Tyson, the president made that claim as a way of segregating radical Islam from religions like Christianity or Judaism. Here’s Tyson (link goes to video clip).

From the clip:

TYSON: Here’s what happens. George Bush, within a week of [the 9/11 terrorist attacks] gave us a speech attempting to distinguish we from they. And who are they? These were sort of the Muslim fundamentalists. And he wants to distinguish we from they. And how does he do it?

He says, “Our God” — of course it’s actually the same God, but that’s a detail, let’s hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament. So, but let’s hold that aside. He says, “Our God is the God” — he’s loosely quoting Genesis, biblical Genesis — “Our God is the God who named the stars.”

This is nasty stuff. It is one thing to slime some not-too-specific group with some intellectual shortcoming that is easily common enough, if not particularly important. It is altogether something else to be repeatedly and specifically defamatory. At least to most of us; not so much, progressives.

Back to The Federalist article:

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s story has three central claims: 1) Bush uttered that precise phrase, 2) in the days immediately after 9/11, 3) in order to distance American religion from that practiced by radical Muslims.

As you have probably already guessed, every single claim is false. Every one! Then there’s Tyson’s aside that Bush’s quote was a “loose quote” of the book of Genesis. Yep, that’s false, too. Add embarrassing biblical illiteracy to Tyson’s list of accomplishments on his CV.

Here is the rest of the problem: just as many in Tyson's audience sussed his fabulisms* as Crooked Timberists cottoned on to that travesty shining example of the social science arts. No one from the self-styled Reason Based Community so much as fluttered an IQ point at Tyson's stylings that were just a little to pat to be true.

The issue of Boyega’s skin color has been such a heated topic of debate online that none of the news outlets who ran stories about fan racism directed at Boyega could cite a single example of it happening. Not on Twitter. Not in an Op-ed, not on movie fan sites.

Not one.

The progressive world view is, to me, anyway, an unending mystery. Self styled as the reality based community, progressives display a childlike faith in, and blindness to, their own bigotries, combined with a shameless facility for making stuff up. And when it comes to vacuous, rote, demonization, they certainly have a case to answer. It's almost, or perhaps completely, as if the only things left in their intellectual armoire are tar brushes and slime buckets.

Of course, it is entirely possible, even probable, that I am as blind to anti-progressives', and my own, transgressions: that we are just as prone to unquestioned assertions and invention for the sake of the narrative, reality or decency be damned.

So, if any of the thousands of progressives in our devoted reading audience could set me straight, I'd appreciate it.

Or anyone else, for that matter. Unfortunately, my memory, self-awareness, and google skills aren't up to the task.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

My wife sent me a school notice about a meeting regarding "The Future of Life Science Education at La Jolla High School" because she thinks it's good for us to attend such things. I generally think such things are a waste of time and terribly boring to boot, so I started thinking up excuses about why I couldn't possibly make it that particular evening.

But then, "Guest Speaker: Craig Venter," caught my eye on the meeting notice. To me, Venter is a rock-star of science, primarily famous for his drive and success in sequencing the Human Genome:

Frustrated with what Venter viewed as the slow pace of progress in the Human Genome project, and unable to get funds for his ideas, he sought funding from the private sector to fund Celera Genomics. The goal of the company was to sequence the entire human genome and release it into the public domain for non-commercial use in much less time and for much less cost than the public human genome project. The company planned to profit from their work by creating a value-added database of genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee. The goal consequently put pressure on the public genome program and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence. DNA from five demographically different individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence of the human genome; one of the individuals was Venter himself. In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. [emphasis added]

In fact, being the nerd that I am, someone like Craig Venter is more of a draw to me than, say, someone like Mick Jagger, though admittedly, Jagger might possibly be somewhat more entertaining.

So I said to my wife, "Why yes dear, there is nothing I'd like better than attending this school meeting!" She looked at me skeptically with raised eyebrows, to which I replied, "No, really. I'm serious!" So we went. Or rather, I went. On the night of the meeting she decided she was too tired and decided not to attend.

There were between 50 and 100 people at the meeting. I was surprised. After all, if it was Jagger instead of Venter, I think it might've been more crowded. I was definitely disappointed that someone that I think is so important would only draw that few people. On the other hand, it was more intimate than if it was a big crowd.

One gentlemen there really stood out. Or should I say stood up? And up and up. He was 6' 11" which is really, really tall and probably 8 inches taller than the next tallest person in attendance. It turned out to be retired NBA superstar Bill Walton who happens to be on the board of directors of one of Venter's ventures. In fact, the main event was a conversation with Bill Walton asking Craig Venter various questions about his personal life, genomics, and his views on education. Two superstars for the price of one!

Some interesting tidbits:

On education, the first thing Venter noted was that he had terrible grades and barely graduated from high school and that was only possible because he talked a teacher into giving him a D- instead of an F in a required class. While I'm not sure that background gives him a lot of credibility to pontificate on how high schools should teach life science, he said that two things they should teach (but don't) are how to take risk, and how to fail (or, more accurately, how to recover from failure).

On competitiveness of biotech, he's confident that even though Europe and China are pumping huge amounts of money into this area, the United States will maintain a lead for a long time. He says that in the United States, a great deal of the funding for biotech comes from an unusual intersection of individual philanthropy and investment (venture) capital which is far more creative, versatile, and nimble than the massive, but blunt and poorly directed funding by the European and Chinese governments.

On the direction of biotech in general and the human genome in particular, he feels that huge advances in all aspects of health care will be coming in the next ten years. He feels that this is a fantastic time to invest in biotech companies.

On sequencing human genomes, he feels that the clause in Obamacare that enables everyone to get insurance without regard for pre-existing conditions is critically important because that enables everyone to get their genome sequenced without having to worry about likely genetic based diseased states (a type of pre-existing condition) which could have precluded them from getting affordable insurance. Having everybody's genome sequenced will enable optimal health therapies to be personally designed for each and every person over their entire lifetime, increasing both health and longevity.

Monday, November 17, 2014

This June, about a month or two before the original Halbig decision, I was talking with my co-blogger and sharing some of my thoughts on healthcare policy and ACA. I'm not big on making hard and fast predictions, but exploring various scenarios and thinking about relative probabilities is a common practice. More about that later. There were a handful of issues that could have been addressed with targeted pieces of legislation that could have drawn solid bipartisan support. Instead we got a serious CF that has barely evidenced all of the related problems it will cause. The political realities make outright repeal very unlikely, however, there is a path forward. First, let's look at the following historical example of a really lousy piece of legislation which was eventually stripped down to something more manageable. In an article titled Let's Taft-Hartley Obamacare by Paul Moreno:

It
is increasingly clear that the Affordable Care Act is not going to be
either completed or abolished, regardless of what happens in November or
in any envisionable future election. It is locked in, but in a peculiarly limited way....

But Obamacare will not be as locked in as, say, Social Security, the
Civil Rights Act, or Medicare. As critics have pointed out, those
programs were enacted with bipartisan support. Obamacare has enough
shortcomings and complications that it will probably track that most
accidental of New Deal legislation, the National Labor Relations Act of
1935, which made organized labor the most powerful interest group in
America for half a century.
...
Almost everyone expected the Court to strike down the Wagner Act. Indeed, many liberals wanted
the Court to do so, to highlight the conflict between the New Deal and
judicial conservatism. Thus the Wagner Act passed the Senate 63 to 12
and passed the House without a recorded vote. The best explanation for
the lopsided majority was not consensus in favor of the bill, but the
conviction held by many of its opponents that the Court would strike it
down — so why incur the enmity of organized labor for nothing?

To
nearly everyone’s surprise, the Court upheld the Wagner Act in April
1937, shortly after Roosevelt had threatened to pack it. Suddenly, the
country was saddled with an act that might not have passed at all, and
certainly not in as radical a form, without the Supreme Court wild card.
However, the Democratic majorities were so overwhelming in 1935 (70 to
20 in the Senate) that the NLRA probably would have passed, albeit by
smaller margins, had the assumed Supreme Court strikedown not been a
factor.

The public was soon put off by the militant tactics —
especially the sit-down strikes — employed by the new unions of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had broken away from
the more conservative AFL. Roosevelt packed the NLRB with CIO partisans,
which alienated both employers and the AFL.
...

When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1946, for the first
time since the beginning of the Depression, they enacted the
Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley). President Truman vetoed
it, calling it a “slave-labor bill,” but Congress overrode the veto.
(Many believe that Truman expected and actually wanted his veto
overridden. He saw that Taft-Hartley was a much-needed correction to the
Wagner Act, and this way he could get it while still keeping the
support of the AFL and CIO.) Taft-Hartley did not go so far as to
repeal the Wagner Act. Instead, it maintained its fundamental principles
while prohibiting some of the most abusive union practices. Most
important, it allowed states to adopt “right-to-work” laws prohibiting
compulsory union membership. The nation’s labor markets adjusted to the
new regime, until today private-sector union membership is about where
it was before the Wagner Act.

When the Roberts Court upheld the
Affordable Care Act in 2012, we found ourselves again saddled with an
act that probably would not have passed at all, and certainly not in so
radical a form, had not the president and Democrats in Congress resorted
to every trick in the book to enact it. But the Court left enough
openings to significantly curtail it. House Republicans have already
taken some small steps, as when they repealed an arbitrary $2,000 cap on
deductibles in small-business health-insurance plans.

Some have
always been there — like allowing interstate competition in health
insurance. (Ironically enough, the liberal New Deal Court invited Congress
to do this in 1944, and it declined.) The Court has held that Congress
cannot force the states to expand Medicaid, and some Republican
governors have taken a stand here. Other provisions, such as the
religious-freedom exemptions, also present possibilities. More will open
up if and when the Republicans take control of the Senate; outright
repeal will be a possibility only if and when they take the presidency,
too. But we can still have a Taft-Hartley improvement in the meantime.

So there is historical precedent...

In an article titled Reforming the Reform Kevin Williamson has some fun which also includes some historical perspective, after which he concludes:

You guys had your shot at this, and you passed the law — but you still
managed to blow it. But there are more intelligent, market-based,
consumer-driven alternatives, and they are ultimately what’s going to
end up getting enacted. We’re here to help — whether you like it or not.

Obamacare—or at least the version of it that the president
and his advisers currently think they can get away with putting into
place—has been upending arrangements and reshuffling the deck in the
health system since the beginning of the year. That’s when the new
insurance rules, subsidies, and optional state Medicaid expansions went
into effect. The law’s defenders say the changes that have been set in
motion are irreversible, in large part because several million people
are now covered by insurance plans sold through the exchanges, and a few
million more are enrolled in Medicaid as a result of Obamacare.
President Obama has stated repeatedly that these developments should
effectively shut the door on further debate over the matter.

Of
course, the president does not get to decide when public debates begin
or end, and the public seems to be in no mood to declare the Obamacare
case closed. Polling has consistently shown that more Americans oppose
the law than support it, and that the opposition is far more intense
than the support. The law is built on a foundation of dramatically
expanded government power over the nation’s health system, which
strikes many voters as a dangerous step toward more bureaucracy, less
choice, higher costs, and lower quality care. The beginning of the
law’s implementation does not appear to have eased these fears, and in
some cases has exacerbated them.

It turns out that repealing Obamacare is not our only hope for reversing
the triumph of the entitlement state. Indeed, there may be an even
better one.
...
We can learn two things from Switzerland and Singapore. First, that
there are countries out there with freer health-care systems than our
own. Second, that it is possible to have one of the freest economies in
the world while also ensuring that every citizen has health insurance.

The impressive results of Switzerland and Singapore drive home a
powerful message: that health care works best when individuals have more
control over their own health spending. The Left can’t bring itself to
believe this; there, it’s an article of faith that “disinterested”
government experts will make better and more cost-efficient decisions
for you than you would make for yourself.

But the examples of
Switzerland and Singapore also drive home the problem with focusing
solely on Obamacare. If we were to spend all our capital “repealing and
replacing” Obamacare, we might not have enough left to tackle the real
drivers of unsustainable single-payer health care in America: Medicare
and Medicaid.
...
In short, migrating future retirees and low-income Americans onto
exchanges could yield substantial benefits to the quality and cost of
subsidized health coverage. But there’s no reason we should accept the
Obamacare exchanges as they are.

Instead of forcing Americans to buy insurance plans that they neither
need nor want — the Obamacare way — we should convert the exchanges into
real marketplaces, places where people can voluntarily buy coverage
that is suited to them. We can do this by repealing Obamacare’s
individual and employer mandates, and by rolling back the plethora of
new federal regulations and tax hikes that make insurance more costly
without improving its quality.
...
More than four-fifths of Americans receive federally subsidized health
insurance; in Switzerland, only about one-fifth do. That’s the
difference between an entitlement leviathan (ours) and a true safety net
(theirs).
...
The good news is that we can do this. We can solve the problem that
conservatives care about more than any other — that America is broke —
while actually making the health-care system work better for
everyone. The poor and the sick and the elderly will benefit from
higher-quality, fiscally sustainable health coverage. And average
tax-paying Americans will benefit from affordable insurance, lower
long-term tax liabilities, and a consumer-driven health-care system that
is centered around them rather than the bureaucracy.
...
It’s time for conservatives to bring Reagan’s lesson to health reform.
Instead of waiting for Obamacare to fail, we should instead devote
ourselves to liberating the entire U.S. health-care system from
government control. If we do that, and demonstrate the value of our
economic principles with tangible results, it won’t matter whether we
have formally repealed Obamacare. We will have transcended it, and
solved the most important policy problem of our time: that of
unsustainable government spending. If we want our children and
grandchildren to inherit the country we grew up in, we have no time to
waste.

Returning to the conversation mentioned at the beginning of this post -

The main point was that we should probably not be overly gloomy. After a
bunch of struggles healthcare access and affordability will probably
be much better 10-20 years hence, despite the law. More importantly, there are many things happening in
the healthcare and life sciences arenas that will allow for the kind of creative destruction that will improve things dramatically. (To be addressed in a future post.) I think this is the high probability scenario. The progressives in their usual clueless manner will of course think that their law brought this all about. Then he replied, "that is what I'm afraid of."

So now I'm allegedly better off regarding my healthcare, but to get there, I had to be held with contempt as being stupid, lied to, and deceived. Well, guess what? The negative value to me of being thought stupid, lied to, and deceived by those with violence at their disposal to force me to do what they want far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far exceeds any possible benefits that might accrue from Obamacare, even if those benefits are substantial.In other words, being made "Better Off" by folks like Gruber has made me worse off.Boudreaux concludes his Gruber post with:

So Jonathan Gruber simply admits that the very process that people on the left romanticize and celebrate – democratic politics – isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Of course, libertarians and public-choice scholars say the same. The difference between the Jonathan Grubers of the world and the [libertarian scholars such as the] Russ Robertses and Bryan Caplans of the world is that the former believe that politics is still commendable as long as good, smart people (such as Gruber) are performing deceptions necessary to trick voters into supporting policies that good, smart people somehow divine are best for the masses, while the latter believe that the very need to deceive rationally ignorant (indeed, rationally irrational) voters is itself a major flaw in politics – a flaw that makes politics far less reliable and admirable than competitive, private markets.

The arrogance of the Grubers of the world is what forces me firmly into the libertarian camp.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Earlier this year history professor author Fred Siegel released an interesting and surprisingly good book titled, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. The introduction begins:

This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It
shows that what we think of liberalism today – the top and bottom
coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with
Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-WWI
disillusionment with American society. In the twenties, the first
writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility
to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of
both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s foundational
writers and thinkers such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells,
Sinclair Lewis and H.L Mencken was to create an American aristocracy of
sorts, to provide a sense of hierarchy and order associated with
European statism.

Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern
liberalism, critical of both capitalism and democracy, was born of a new
class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. They despised both
the individual businessman's pursuit of profit and the conventional
individual's pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by
the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.

The introduction concludes:

Liberalism, as a
search for status, is sufficiently adaptable that even in failure,
self-satisfaction trumps self-examination. As the critic Edmund
Wilson noted without irony, the liberal (or “progressive reformer,”
in his term) has “evolved a psychological mechanism which enables
him to turn moral judgments against himself into moral judgments
against society.” This is a book
about the inner life of American liberalism over the past ninety
years and its love affair with its own ambitions and emotional
impulses. Liberals believe that they deserve more power because they
act on behalf of people's best interests – even if the darn fools
don't know it. (emphasis mine)

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT
economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the
stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was
really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Mr. Driscoll concludes: "The left have displayed enormous condescension to voters in recent
years; lying is merely one manifestation of that. And they wonder why
they got clobbered last week."

The concluding chapter contains the following passage:

Liberalism,
argued Herbert Croly and his heirs, rested on “disinterestedness.”
Experts and intellectuals could be trusted, their theory held,
because, unlike the Jeffersonian small-business owners, they weren't
motivated by narrow self-interest. But with the expansions of the
Great Society and onward, much of the public came to see politicians
in general and liberals in particular as engaged in the
self-interested business of expanding government expressly to secure
policies and privileges for themselves and their supporters. The
growing importance of public-sector unions has greatly increased the
sense that government has gone into business for itself.

In addition to dealing with increasingly complex and burdensome tax and regulatory regimes economic actors must contend with a bureaucracy and elected officials that have become practically parasitic. Even when this problem was less pronounced, there were still limits to how much of a positive role the state could play. As the story is usually told, there is a statist bias with many private actors being unfairly vilified. Many such examples are in evidence in an old post titled revisiting economic history . (If you haven't seen this post before you might want to give it some attention.) Some of the portrayals are blatantly misleading others are more subtle. Economic history is not the only area of inquiry where the conventional wisdom is transmitted through very questionable story-lines.

Returning to The Revolt Against the Masses, in a chapter titled Three Trials, the author provides the following (excerpts):

No one incident or
event contributed more to the self-understanding of liberals or the
way they conceived of their political rivals over the past half
century than the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” or more precisely the
version of the trial rendered in the wake of McCarthyism by the 1955
Broadway hit Inherit the Wind.

...

Beginning in the
1950s, the play Inherit the Wind and the two film versions of
the stage production suffused the liberal imagination.

...

In the dramatized
version of the case, which took considerable liberties with the
historical record, the trial was initiated when Scopes, a high school
biology teacher, was dragged out of his classroom by a mob and thrown
into jail. In reality, as historian Edward Larson showed in his
scrupulous rendering of the case based on primary sources, there was
no mob, nor was there a jailing. Evolution had long been part of the
Tennessee high school curriculum, and there had been no attempt to
enforce the symbolic law – the Butler Act – that barred its
teaching. In an era when science was seen as wondrous, this law was
meant more as a matter of symbolism than substance. It was a period
in which eugenics, which had first been introduced by Darwin's cousin
Francis Galton, won strong support from liberals who supported both
family planning and economic planning. Thirty-five states had
enacted laws to restrain the ability of the genetically “unfit”
to reproduce themselves.

The case was a
contrivance from the outset. The American Civil Liberties Union,
founded in the wake of WWI's repression, had initiated the case,
which it saw as an opportunity to repeal the Butler Act while also
making a name for itself. The ACLU ran newspaper ads across the
state looking for a teacher who would be willing to cooperate with
them in challenging the state law. They needed a defendant who would
agree to be tried for violating the Butler Act. The town fathers of
Dayton envisioned the trial as a potential boon that could put them
on the map, and they convinced Scopes, a local high school teacher,
to intentionally incriminate himself so that he would quality as a
defendant and the state's case could go forward. His arrest was a
friendly affair arranged by local boosters as a prelude to the show,
which would make history by being the first trial broadcast on radio.

...

Mencken, who
wrote about the trial for the Baltimore Sun, gilded the
liberal disdain for Bryan by depicting him as a buffoonish bigot and
the “idol of morondom.” Mencken, a eugenicist, despised Bryan as
a demagogue “animated by the ambition of a common man to get his
thumb into their eyes.” He mocked the locals as “Babbits,”
“morons,” “peasants,” and “yokels,” which, to be fair,
was no less caustic than his usual characterizations of the immigrant
masses.

Bryan saw the
Scopes trial as in part a matter of self-government. The trial, he
wrote, raised the question of “whether the people...have a right to
control the educational system which they have created and which they
tax themselves to support.” By contrast, Mencken saw the trial,
and Bryan in particular, as the living proof of why democracy was a
despicable form of government. Mencken's Notes on Democracy
(1926) argued that democracy was both impossible and undesirable.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, by then dethroned, praised the book highly, but a
friend sighed that he wished Mencken hadn't written it, “because it
reveals too much about him.” It was a tedious, repetitious
performance by an intellectual vaudevillian whose writing never rose
above his resentments.

But Bryan,
Mencken's avatar of dreadful democracy, was far from a bigoted
provincial man. A well-read world traveler, Bryan had read On the
Origin of Species in 1905 and had engaged in an ongoing debate
about the book with eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president
of the American Museum of Natural History. The Great Commoner
treated his talented wife as a partner and decried the sin of
religious prejudice. He roundly criticized his supporters who
attributed his 1908 defeat at the hands of William Howard Taft to a
Catholic conspiracy, and he would later take Henry Ford publicly to
task for publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

...

Regardless of
what happened in Dayton, the effect of the case was clear:
European-like divisions, largely absent thus far in America, opened
up between science and revealed religion – it was a chasm never to
be closed. Absent the Scopes controversy, some of the
fundamentalists might have drifted into the position already adopted
by a few of their leaders that evolution was but another name for
God's creation.

...

After Scopes, and
the case's revival with Inherit the Wind, fundamentalists were
seen by many Americans as not just wrong about evolution, which was
clear enough, but so psychologically deranged that they needed to be
barred from the public square.

The irony of the
Scopes trial, notes historian Michael Kazin, was that it led liberals
to tag Bryan, who in many ways was a proto-New Dealer, as a
“right-wing authoritarian.” At the same time, it helped position
Mencken – the rabidly anti-democratic and sometimes anti-Semitic
supporter of eugenics who admired both the Kaiser and 1930s Germany –
as “the champion of liberalism.” But this is less of an irony
than it appears to Kazin. Modern liberalism, before, during, and
since the New Deal, has been based in large measure on Croly's
“exceptional fellow countrymen,” the professionals who feel
contempt or pity for the unwashed and who are resentful that many
business people are better off than they are. Bryan's humiliation
became a central event in the liberal story of modern America; it
linked together the post-WWI persecutions by rednecks, the execution
of Saco and Vanzetti, and Sinclair Lewis's ever-popular It Can't
Happen Here, the 1935 novel in which a Bryan-like leader
established a dictatorship in America. It's a story whose echoes can
still be heard during dinner-table conversations in America's hipper
precincts.

I repeatedly hear about "the narrative" from my progressive friends. My question is, "do you care how much in your story is fiction and how much is non-fiction?" Even more than what is written in a history book, movies, plays and novels shape the culture. As Breitbart observed and Lawrence Meyers explains, politics is downstream from culture.